Yes, there is a thorough discussion on http://realclimate.org. I've not been following it very closely, however, if over 10 years those are all the "nasty" emails that could be found, one would be hard pressed to come away thinking that there is a conspiracy to perpetrate a climate change fraud.

I'm not familiar with the claims of data being lost, but I can assure you that there are plenty of publicly available raw data sets that show the warming over the past 100 years. It is my understanding that they aren't as complete as CRU's because they do not rely on proprietary raw data, but they tell the same story.

I did not know... I'll let the blogosphere know right away.

The "climate deniers" do not claim we are not warming. They dispute the source. Everyone admits warming happened prior to 1940 (1934 is highest recorded by man), then we dropped until the 70's, then went up again.

The Global Warming Swindle shows some very compelling graphs that show solar activity much more closer linked to temperature than carbon dioxide is.

The implication of the GWS is that scientists key in on CO2 because there is nothing we can ever do about water vapour and sun activity.

CO2 only makes up .54% of the gas in the atmosphere and here is its rank in terms of greenhouse gases:

The contribution to the greenhouse effect by a gas is affected by both the characteristics of the gas and its abundance. For example, on a molecule-for-molecule basis methane is about eight times stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide[6], but it is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total contribution is smaller. When these gases are ranked by their contribution to the greenhouse effect, the most important are:[7]

The "climate deniers" do not claim we are not warming. They dispute the source. Everyone admits warming happened prior to 1940 (1934 is highest recorded by man), then we dropped until the 70's, then went up again.

Huh? A thirty-second google search reveals:

The Global Warming Swindle shows some very compelling graphs that show solar activity much more closer linked to temperature than carbon dioxide is.

Over the history of the earth that is of course true. Unfortunately, there has been no solar activity that can explain the above temperature anomalies.

The implication of the GWS is that scientists key in on CO2 because there is nothing we can ever do about water vapour and sun activity.

CO2 only makes up .54% of the gas in the atmosphere and here is its rank in terms of greenhouse gases:[...]

That is true - but so what? If we had no greenhouse effect the planet would be a toasty negative 18 degrees on average rather than the plus 15 degrees it is now. The effect of CO2 is 10-25% of the 33 degrees, or 3.5-8 degrees. Double the total CO2 and you'll get another 3.5-8 degrees (very roughly). Add to that the release of methane from permafrost regions, and changes to the hydrological cycle (i.e. water vapour), and you can get a nasty feedback cycle.

I'm very curious what motivation could be behind the "swindle" referred to above. Do you really think it is credible that thousands of largely government funded scientists are engaged in a societal "swindle"? Conversely, who funds the anthropogenic warming skeptics, and what is their record on honesty and straight dealing?

Excellent graph. Now, how do you explain the temperature rise from 1910 to 1940 (and drop after 1940 to1975)? It's about the same rise as 1975 to 2010.

We keep shooting up steadliy in CO2 emmissions, but the graph showed no increase in temperature until 1975. Why blame CO2 for 1975-2005 if we don't blame it for 1940-75? And why the rise from 1910-1940 when CO2 was not rising very heavily?

The sharpest increase in CO2 emmissions in the history of man was 1960 to 1980, yet that timeframe shows flat temperature.

I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, however, the accepted version of the above plot is:

Your plot is from a Loehle & McCulloch 2008 paper in a less-than-reputable journal that uses 18 data points to represent the whole world. Even if their numbers were accurate, this is probably a poor way to represent the world temperature signal. See the discussion of the original paper and its correction at realclimate.org here.

Re your other points - no one is claiming that CO2 is the only factor in climate or decadal variability. You expect ups and downs in the temperature record. However, on the long term, climate scientists expect the world to warm up. So sure, next year may be cooler than this year. In a decade it may be cooler, but the probability of that is low. In 50 years, the chance of it being cooler is almost nil. Thats why the graph I supplied smooths the data by five years.

So sure, you start any graph at 1998 and it looks like there hasn't been much warming. That is because 1998 was a very strong el Nino year, and El Nino events release a lot of heat into the atmosphere, leading to a warmer-than-usual year. Start the graph in 1996 instead and you get a very different picture,though one that is equally unfair because that was a strong La Nina (colder than normal). Average them out, and you get a relatively monotonic increase in surface temperatures.

The fact is nature is responsible for all the ups and downs. Man can certainly reduce pollutants to make the air quality better, but there is nothingman can do that will make any significant change to global warming/cooling.

We can spend billions and billions of dollars to achieve statistically meaningless changes.

I'm very curious what motivation could be behind the "swindle" referred to above. Do you really think it is credible that thousands of largely government funded scientists are engaged in a societal "swindle"?

... in the paragraph above it says that skeptics see a climate-change conspiracy, and such a conspiracy is not possible. (But in) fact, what skeptics see is a scientific discipline that is self-defined by the position it takes on global warming. This self-defined science requires no conspiracy. I have seen it happen in economics. Macroeconomic modeling as of 1970 was self-defined as Keynesian orthodoxy, with no conspiracy taking place. The fact that the CRU leaks uncover some conspiratorial emails and computer code is what leads me to say that climate science is at least one standard deviation worse than what would be normal in economics.

In sum, the thousands of government funded scientists of which you write all face the same incentives to maintain their funding, so the uniformity of their responses is identical to that which would have resulted from collusion, whether they actually conspired or not. Still, the leaked emails *do* suggest that there is certainly some degree of swindle.

^ Fair enough - such a thing could happen, and to a degree may be happening. However, "contrarian" evidence does make it into the literature. Some friends of mine published in GRL that the ocean was cooling over the last 10 years or so (Lyman et al 2006). While it is easy for the atmosphere to heat or cool, the ocean has a lot more heat capacity, and for it to have cooled over the last 10 years would mean there was really an issue with our understanding of the heat budget.

So, a) that paper was published in a a good journal. b) it inspired a bunch of people to reconsider their data sets and see why this surprising and "contrarian" result was found. The results were taken seriously because the scientists in question were clearly not in anyone's pocket, and they were as surprised by the results as any one else. I can vouch personally that all of them are straightforward and honest researchers, none of whose funding depends directly on showing that there is climate change or not. The end result of their paper was that there was indeed an error in the original data that the authors had not caught - that error was identified, it was an honest error (coding mistake), the ocean was actually warming as previous work had shown and folks have moved on.

The point being that there was no attempt to discredit these scientists, the paper was published in a very good journal, and the climate science community, while skeptical, did not shout this paper down. So given that, I am relatively optimistic that the community is self-regulating itself honestly, and that if there were really compelling evidence that the data was being cooked it would be found.

The fact is nature is responsible for all the ups and downs. Man can certainly reduce pollutants to make the air quality better, but there is nothingman can do that will make any significant change to global warming/cooling.

We can spend billions and billions of dollars to achieve statistically meaningless changes.

Right. And there are so many Cod in the Atlantic that we could never fish them into extinction, and that is why, as we all know, the economy of Newfoundland is based on the Cod fishery to this very day.

The point being that there was no attempt to discredit these scientists, the paper was published in a very good journal, and the climate science community, while skeptical, did not shout this paper down. So given that, I am relatively optimistic that the community is self-regulating itself honestly, and that if there were really compelling evidence that the data was being cooked it would be found.

There have been several quite prominent instances in the last decade or so of scientists being exposed and debunked, not by the deniers, but by other scientists.

Not, as you seem to think, the same as "your opinion", which is all you are posting, unsupported by any actual evidence.

How many times do you want to read the evidence?

Some of us can read and comprehend information the first time we see it, we don't need to see it again and again.

You obviously have not done any research of your own, or are involved in making money off the gullibility of the populace.

Start with this. I can continue with hundreds of other postings if you are too lazy to do your own research.

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. Eric Hoffer

James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, made statements clearly designed to frighten people.

Both men are politically active in climate change and at the forefront of the attempt to convince the world that CO2 is a problem. Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new - except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing. As Andrew Weaver summarized, ”All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.”

Hansen increases urgency for action claiming we are on the verge of a tipping point, defined as follows. “Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.”

We’re reaching a tipping point, but it’s not the one Hansen anticipates. We’re close to the point where the public and politicians realize they have been totally deceived about the nature and cause of climate change. Even before a shift to concern about the economy polls showed a growing shift in public opinion.

Weaver is also troubled by his own definition of dramatic change occurring. He wrote in a March 24 article, in the Vancouver Sun, “There are many depressing things about being a climate scientist these days. The emerging data is going from bad to worse and the political leadership is still acting as if we have all the time in the world to deal with global warming.”

Yes, it’s depressing but because people are not fooled any more and politicians are not acting as Weaver expects. And yes, emerging data is going from bad to worse, but only because it shows CO2 is not causing warming.

Other remarks by both men indicate their fear. For example, Hansen said, “The democratic process doesn’t seem to be working.”

It’s a bizarre comment from a civil servant prior to his apparently breaking US law (the Hatch Act) again by participating in a public protest at the headquarters of E.ON, a power firm in Coventry, England. The push for elimination of CO2 emissions is failing because, despite his histrionics, democracy is working.

A few days later in the Vancouver Sun article ironically titled “’Environmentalists’ are abandoning science,” Weaver wrote, “The scientific community has a very solid understanding of what is causing global warming: It is overwhelmingly because of the combustion of fossil fuels. Thus, the solution to the problem is as simple as it is daunting: The elimination of fossil fuel use in our economies.”

Weaver claims he and his IPCC colleagues “have been as a clear as we know how about the science and the measures needed.” This is simply not the case. Their rules mean they only look at human causes of climate change. They produce a political summary for policymakers then used to make sure the science report agrees with the summary. (Canada Free Press)

More important, the entire claim of human caused CO2 global warming is based on computer models that simply can’t work.

It’s not surprising Hansen and Weaver are computer modelers; they have the most invested in these claims and the most to lose professionally and politically. I watched over the years as computer modelers took over and dominated climate science, particularly through the IPCC. But as Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton, said in the May 1999 issue of the American Physical Society and still valid today, “They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate.” However, “If we persevere patiently with observing the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we are able both to understand and to predict. Until then, we must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don’t believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer.”

Or as Pierre Gallois put it, “If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it.” - but more and more people are criticizing it.

Why have two prominent scientists made such unsupportable sensationalist comments? Simple – they’re losing control of their ability to achieve their political objectives. Here is a list of events raising their fears:

• Even the lowest computer model temperature projections have overestimated the reality. They failed to project the cooling that has occurred since 2000. • That cooling occurred as CO2 levels rose in complete contradiction to IPCC assumptions. • Scientists doing proper science yet derogatively labeled skeptics by Hansen and Weaver have consistently shown the fallacy in the assumptions and methods of the IPCC. • The Kyoto Accord has failed and attempts to find a replacement are failing. • Proponents of the claims of human induced global warming, such as Al Gore, have lost credibility by making money from the sale of carbon credits. • Increasingly illogical statements, such as the claim that current cooling is due to warming, raise doubts even if you don’t understand the science. • More and more politicians, such as Northern Ireland’s Sammy Watson and Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus are speaking out against global warming claims. • The real cost of reducing CO2 emissions and the inadequacies of alternative fuels are emerging. • The public does not see warming as a concern. A Pew Center poll of January 22, 2009 showed it 20th on a list of 20 top priorities. On March 25, 2009 the Gallup Pole reported, “Global warming is clearly the environmental issue of least concern to Americans. In fact, global warming is the only issue for which more Americans say they have little to no concern than say they have a great deal of concern.” • The growing lack of commitment of the Obama government who they believed would implement their policies. Hansen notes, “he was growing “concerned” over the stance taken by the new US administration on global warming.”

Instead of accepting that their science and proposed actions are wrong they blame the people. Hansen’s comment that democracy isn’t working means it is not doing what he wants. Weaver’s remark that, “The public debate is becoming a caricature” is an arrogant insult and sadly typical of my experience with too many of the climate modelers. The people whose fears and lack of knowledge they exploited and who they thought were too stupid to understand are using democracy to stop the fraud. Hansen and Weaver’s comments disclose their fears as Hoffer predicted.

Start with this. I can continue with hundreds of other postings if you are too lazy to do your own research.

You seem to be confusing reading an ill-informed blog with doing research. To start

Even the lowest computer model temperature projections have overestimated the reality. They failed to project the cooling that has occurred since 2000.

This is patently false. a) there has been warming since 2000: 2000 had a temp anomaly of 0.335 deg C, and 2008 had 0.43. link. b) all the computer models have oscillations about the mean upwards trend that are large enough to have periods of cooling; just because there is cooling for a few years does not mean that the background trend is incorrect. None of the models claim to reproduce these oscillations properly since they are essentially chaotic. However, they do claim that the long-term trend is reproducible.

A good analogy is predicting where you will cigarette smoke from a single cigarette. No computer model will get the exact wisps of smoke correct, but it is straightforward to get the average direction the smoke cloud will drift.

^ Ha ha, I'm pretty sure that he has not, and I'd even be willing to bet that, as a prominent scientist who travels a lot, his carbon footprint is well above normal. However, your implied criticism is kind of like if your overweight doctor tells you'll die if you don't lose weight and you ignore him - sure maybe the doctor isn't taking his own medicine (perhaps for valid reasons) but it doesn't make his prescription incorrect.

Besides, I don't think many people are seriously saying that we need to do without the comforts of modern life in order to cut carbon emissions. They are saying that we need to heavily tax carbon and divert the tax funds to pay for alternative energy research. If you emit CO2 you should pay society for the harm you cause. If you do that, solar, wind and nuclear become much more economical per Watt; make them more economical, and the economy of scale will make them even cheaper. But until you break the stranglehold of relatively "cheap" oil and coal that can't happen.

^ Ha ha, I'm pretty sure that he has not, and I'd even be willing to bet that, as a prominent scientist who travels a lot, his carbon footprint is well above normal. However, your implied criticism is kind of like if your overweight doctor tells you'll die if you don't lose weight and you ignore him - sure maybe the doctor isn't taking his own medicine (perhaps for valid reasons) but it doesn't make his prescription incorrect.

Besides, I don't think many people are seriously saying that we need to do without the comforts of modern life in order to cut carbon emissions. They are saying that we need to heavily tax carbon and divert the tax funds to pay for alternative energy research. If you emit CO2 you should pay society for the harm you cause. If you do that, solar, wind and nuclear become much more economical per Watt; make them more economical, and the economy of scale will make them even cheaper. But until you break the stranglehold of relatively "cheap" oil and coal that can't happen.

Well then, is Andrew Weaver imposing his own heavy tax on his own use of fossil fules, and diverting his money to pay for alternate energy research? I suppose he is not. So if he really thinks we are nearing the tipping point, why will he not even put his own money where his mouth is? It's one thing the doctor dying of his own obesity, but Andrew Weaver is taking childrens lives with his actions.

^ I have no idea, but it wouldn't shock me if Weaver bought carbon offsets just as you describe. However, in order to participate in the scientific and policy debate he needs to fly places, run supercomputers, have an office etc. That isn't the point - the point is that if society changed its energy sources he could do all that and more w/o adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

The stolen e-mails have prompted queries about whether Nature will investigate some of the researchers' own papers. One e-mail talked of displaying the data using a 'trick' — slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, but a word that denialists have used to accuse the researchers of fabricating their results. It is Nature's policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.